Last FM and Spotify blues

Once upon a time, I was a subscriber to Last FM. They had an awesome feature that would scan your current music library, and play recommended songs and artists that you haven’t listened to based upon what what music was in your library. You could tailor this by ‘liking’ or ‘disliking’ a song. The great thing about this is that you could listen to this all day long with few repeats, and it was very instrumental in many of my music purchases.

As someone who sits at work all day with my head phones on, this was an awesome way to find music I love that I hadn’t heard before. It was a golden time.

Then, due to reasons (not exactly sure what they are myself), Last FM moved away from a direct streaming of this service to picking up these songs from YouTube. Which just didn’t work due to the sheer number of people of varying degrees of talent covering otherwise awesome tunes, and the fact that the YouTube adverts would occasionally make the service crash. Due to the drop in quality, I rather sadly cancelled my subscription, and subscribed to Spotify instead. While Spotify is a great service, it is sadly lacking in the department of recommending awesomeness to me based upon what I like to listen to. The closest I’ve found is the ‘Discover Weekly’ play list, which is a playlist of 30 songs that are built around music you have listened previously to on Spotify. Sadly, this can be usually be blown through in about 2 hours of listening.

So, while I do like the service Spotify provides, I do find it lacking in terms of how I like to listen to music. I now instead grab any songs I really like from the weekly playlist and bung it into my ‘Kick Arse Music’ playlist – which is the playlist I listen to in shuffle mode throughout the week. This playlist at time of typing this contains 247 songs, and is over 16 hours long.

Any way, the reason I’m writing this post is that this week, the Spotify Discover Weekly play list has actually delivered for the first time in a very long time, and I’ve spent all of the last 2 days listening to a band I’d never heard of before – The Vincent Black Shadow. My current favourite song is Don’t Make Me So Mad, and I’d recommend it to anyone who is a fan of something hard rocky that sounds similar to Gwen Stefani.

Also, I miss the old Last FM service still. It would be awesome if Spotify could just continually stream stuff I may like all day with few repeats like the old Last FM did. But for now, I’ll just keep playing my Kick Arse Music playlist, and cursing the shuffle feature that seems to stick with the same 30 songs every time until I add enough new songs that the music algorithm gets messed up.